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Of Nerds and Men; or How Trump Steamrolled the Media and Political Class
The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump has been successful because he is able to dominate the media cycle and “troll” his opponents in the internet parlance. No one who says these things ever seems to explain or understand what this actually means. These terms describe how the underlying relationship between Trump and media and the rest of the political class has manifested itself in the campaign. Our entire political and media class are what can fairly be called “nerds.” Trump is not a nerd. This has allowed Trump to use the media and political class’s social disconnect with the rest of America to manipulate them into making what, to the public, are completely inappropriate and counterproductive responses to the things he says. The story of the 2016 campaign has been one of class clown Donald Trump torturing a series of clueless yet earnest teacher’s pets.
The term “nerd” is an old one and one with a particular meaning. A nerd is someone who, despite often being otherwise intelligent, is unable to pick up social cues and context when interacting with the majority of people such that they often respond in socially awkward or inappropriate ways. Nerds do not fully understand the social situations that confront them. To get around this problem, nerds construct their own subcultures with simplified and agreed mores that are understood by fellow nerds. This allows nerds to operate in an environment that they understand and are comfortable. When taken outside of this sub culture and confronted with someone who doesn’t share the agreed upon assumptions of that group, a nerd is completely defenseless and unable to understand the person confronting them.
When people think of “nerds,” guys in horn rimmed glasses working in labs come to mind. Indeed, this type of nerd exists. These “Big Bang Theory Nerds” are not the nerds who inhabit politics and the media. Big Bang Theory nerds are often too introverted and scientifically inclined for the media or politics. Media and politics are inhabited by what I call “alpha nerds.” These are nerds who are not as scientifically inclined as the Big Bang Theory nerds but are extroverted and clever. Big Bang Theory nerds are much more under the radar. They are too busy learning long division and calculus, playing Minecraft if they are the right age, and going on to careers in science and engineering. Alpha nerds are busy being the teacher’s pet, running for student council, joining the debate club and doing everything else necessary to check the blocks on their college applications with an earnestness few normal people are able to achieve. Alpha nerds get around their awkwardness by earnestly following the rules and meeting the expectation of their teachers, bosses, and those in authority; after all, earnestly following rules doesn’t require much emotional subtlety or adeptness.
Since this type of nerd has gotten around their social awkwardness by following rules, they tend to thrive in bureaucracy and rule based environments. They are often predisposed to becoming petty tyrants exacting their revenge on the non nerds whom they never understood or felt appreciated them. They also are usually dismissive of anyone outside of their nerd subculture. Artificially snobbery and credentialism are things that come naturally to many alpha nerds.
For decades, Hollywood has used alpha nerds as comic foils for normal movie protagonists. The alpha nerd’s inability to understand the social cues and subtleties of anyone outside their subculture, their excessive earnestness and complete defenselessness against ridicule can be used to great comic effect. In Animal House, the alpha nerds of the Omega House — with earnest commitment to God, country and Faber College — are destroyed by their inability to understand or respond to the ridicule of the normals of Delta House. Judge Smails and his band of alpha nerds who run Bushwood Country Club can only react in uncomprehending horror at the antics of normal Al Czervik.
Media and politics is inhabited almost entirely by alpha nerds. Like all nerds, the alpha nerds of media and politics have created own subculture that is easier for them to understand and navigate than mainstream culture. Since they dominate media and politics, their nerd culture is our political and media culture. Washington is the national capital of alpha nerds. They run the entire city and by extension the country.
The political and media elite in this country on both sides are nerds compared to the average American. People talk about the divide between Washington and “flyover country.” The geographic divide, however, is a reflection of the more profound divide between the nerd culture of media and politics and the normal culture of the rest of America. The class of nerds who populate our media and political classes and have made it their own safe ecosystem.
Politicians in the past have — if they were not alpha nerds to begin with — learned to pass as such and speak the language and follow the social cues of the alpha nerd media and political sub culture. In contrast Trump in contrast did not. Like Al Czervik stepping onto the course at Bushwood or Eric Stratton walking the halls of Faber College, Trump not only isn’t a part of the alpha nerd culture of politics and the media, he rejects all of its standards and agreed upon social cues. Confronted with someone who refuses to recognize or be a part of their agreed upon culture, the alpha nerds of our media and politics have completely melted down.
Again and again during the Republican primaries, Trump used the media and Republican alpha nerds’ inability to understand context and larger meaning outside of their own subculture against them. Trump turned his campaign from celebrity side show to serious threat to win the nomination when he said that if elected he would build a wall on the Mexican border at the Mexican government’s expense and deport all 11 million illegals in the country within two years.
The media and his Republican opponents, being nerds, took this proposal literally. Further — since it was a violation of the mores of the political nerd sub culture — they figured Trump saying it was an offense worthy of ending his career. So the media and Republican response to Trump’s proposal was twofold; they said it was impossible and that Trump was unfit for office for even proposing it.
Unfortunately for Republicans, the voting public largely doesn’t live in the nerd sub culture of Washington. Worse still, the public had grown tired of attempts to foist it on them in the form of political correctness. Unlike the alpha nerds in the media Republican party, the voting public understood the context of the proposal. Trump’s proposal came at the end of over 20 years of both parties refusing to take the immigration problem seriously despite the public’s increasing concern and anger over it. Taken in context, a politician standing-up and having the audacity to say he was going to build a wall and send Mexico the bill was like a breath of fresh air. Moreover, the public understood that sometimes people say things to make a point and engage in hyperbole to get the listener’s attention and show them they are serious. The public didn’t care whether it was practical to build a wall and bill Mexico or actually deport every illegal alien in two years. What they cared about was that someone was finally willing to take the problem seriously and demand the political class do the same.
So when the Republicans attacked the proposal as being impractical, the attack had no effect. Worse because they thought Trump’s saying it was enough to end his candidacy, Republicans wound up leaving the impression that Donald Trump was the only one who could be trusted to take the problem seriously or offer any solutions. What plans did Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio offer to deal with immigration? I honestly have no idea and neither do most GOP voters. What people knew about Republicans and immigration was Donald Trump wanted to build a wall and deport every illegal immigrant in the country and Republicans thought that was beyond the pale.
This pattern repeated itself when Trump said after the San Bernardino terrorist attack that the US should consider banning all Muslim immigration until we can figure out how to vet them. Again, the alpha nerd Republicans were unable to see the larger context of his statement and were doomed to give a counterproductive response. The Republican party saw this as another grave breach of the rules of the nerd culture of politics. This time they thought for sure the GOP voters would understand how unfit he was. So the Republican response consisted of variants of “how dare you” and not much else.
Meanwhile, the non-nerd GOP voters saw it as a common sense response to a problem. They also understood that you solve problems by having a dialogue. The first proposed solution is not often the one adopted. Banning Muslim immigrants is, like building a will along the Mexican border, an extreme solution. Islamic terrorism is an extreme problem; perhaps it demands an extreme solution. What GOP voters expected in response to Trump’s proposal was for the other candidates to — if not endorse the proposal — offer their own counter solution. What they got instead was outrage over Trump’s disregard of the mores of the media and political nerd culture the voting public neither adheres to nor cares about. Once again Trump’s opponents left the impression that Trump was the only candidate who took the problem seriously or bothered to offer a solution.
Time and again this pattern repeated itself. Trump would do or say something that violated the political nerd subculture. His opponents would then respond with outrage over his breaking their subculture’s rules but fail to offer a meaningful response to the underlying issue leaving the voters with impression that Trump was the only one who cared about solving the problem. The most common answer given by Trump supporters to the question of why they support Trump is that he cares about them and their problems. This is not an accident. This is the result of the media and his Republican opponents being so steeped in their own nerd sub culture that they were unable to get past Trump’s rejection of it and speak to the public in terms sensible outside of that culture.
The media and political class cannot comprehend Donald Trump or understand what he is saying in the same way the rest of America can. This process is repeating itself in Trump’s general election confrontation with Hillary Clinton. The media and Clinton campaign’s reaction to Donald Trump’s invitation to Russia to provide the 33,000 emails Clinton deleted from her private server is a replay of what happened in the Republican primaries.
Normal America understood Trump was telling a joke to make a larger point about Hillary’s email problem. Trump’s statement is the kind of quip someone would make to the person next to them on the train or to the person serving them their coffee “yeah maybe the Russians can give those emails to the FBI.” Everyone in America except the media and the political class knew Trump didn’t mean it as a literal call for the Russians to hack Hillary’s email.
Were our media and political class not entirely populated with over earnest alpha nerds, they would have gotten the joke and responded appropriately. The way to deal with Trump is not take the bait he puts out. Deal with his humor and poking with your own. A Hillary campaign not run by alpha nerds would have said something like “Hillary lost some good recipes and pictures of her grandkids when those emails were deleted. She would like them back too.” That would have defused the entire thing and made Trump look small and unserious as well as reemphasized the point that there was nothing significant in those emails.
The media and political class — being nerds and unable to understand humor or sarcasm that hasn’t been dumbed down for their particular sub culture — didn’t get the joke and thought Trump was calling for Russian espionage to assist his campaign. Their response was unsurprisingly bizarre to the non-nerd observer and turned out to be completely counterproductive to their cause. By taking Trump seriously and accusing him of collaboration with the Russians, they ended up not only looking foolish and humorless but also inadvertently admitting that Hillary’s email problem was a national security issue, something they have been vehemently denying for months. Moreover, since the rest of the country got the joke, the claims that this made Trump unfit for office have had no effect.
Trump is Eric Straton from the Delta House and the media and political class are the humorless Omegas totally unable to understand or respond to the ridicule heaped on them by the Deltas. Unless the alpha nerds of the media and Hillary Clinton campaign figure out a way to relate to and communicate with the larger American public on its terms the way Donald Trump does, he will continue to own the news cycle and steamroll them.
Published in General
Wow, that’s your takeaway. I wonder how many people would sum it up this way?
John Kluge wrote this long post and the only thing you can learn from it is that Trump is the issue here and not the fools who inhabit the political class. I’m agog.
Yes, there are so many of the canny politicians, aren’t there? These people really know how this world works and they just can figure things out with their brains. They are just so … canny and clever, too.
Why does he keep winning, though? WHY? Let me give you a clue: you don’t know and that’s what this post is about, the inability for a niche class to understand the real world.
Do you know why? Are you a real person?
Oh, I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m just saying all these people with political expertise (especially the ones who managed to get elected in previous races) could maybe have toned down the outrage and made some observations as to what’s working for Trump and why. Calling Trump voters “yokels” and “chumps” may feel good (speaking of condescension), but it hasn’t helped the conservative cause, has it?
Try not to take it personally. I admit to having a bent toward dark humor and enjoying the absurdity of it all. John says “NeverTrumpers” have been ineffective by criticizing Trump and then NeverTrumpers come in here and hammer Trump some more. Sorry, I find it funny.
You have Dowdified my comment. I said a bunch more, and you quote only one line and ask if that’s my whole takeaway. Not cool.
Then I think you are missing what at least this nevertrumper is saying. I am certainly not calling the trumpers names, nor am I simply criticizing Trump for the sake of criticizing Trump. Rather, what I did was to point out that trumpers have not simply accepted Trump’s statements, such as those about deportations and killing families of terrorists, as hyperbolic statements that really mean, “I care about your problems,” but instead have taken them literally and have gone to great lengths to defend those “hyperbolic” statements on Ricochet. In other words, I’m challenging the premise of the OP, not criticizing Trump per se.
I don’t see why that’s funny. Nor do I see why it’s somehow impossible to attack this OP without being told, “See, you are proving the OP is correct by the sheer act of trying to argue against it.” That is a tautology, which really is no way to have a discussion.
I cannot speak for NeverTrumpers, but I don’t see a great deal of difference, in general terms, between Trump’s supporters and the supporters for most other political candidates. A certain percentage have reasonable reasons for their support, a certain percentage are taken in by rhetoric, a certain percentage have less than admirable reasons, and a certain percentage really don’t know. Clinton’s support is likely broken down along similar lines. It’s also not uncommon in elections for critics of a candidate to question the intelligence of supporters of that candidate. Happens all the time. My issue is with the oversimplification of the objections to Trump as a candidate in the O/P and what followed, buttressed by the notion that critics of the candidate just don’t get it. By and large, I don’t think that’s correct, and, as I said, there was a degree of condescension in the presentation that ironically echoes the condescension allegedly shown Trump supporters by his critics.
Forget everything I said before, John. You’re right, they are nerds:
The “You just don’t get it” argument is one that feminists and other leftists have been using for years. It works, because the most logical counter-argument and a battery of facts can be answered with, “You still just don’t get it.” That’s what we are getting with this post and some of the comments lauding it.
“Your criticism of this post shows that you just don’t get it. Too bad you are not a normal person, but instead, you are a sad nerd. And by the way, no criticism of Trump or his supporters will be countenanced. This thread is for criticizing you!”
Well, right. I read that particular comment of yours as being mostly true, although pertaining to an exceedingly small subset of people here. I think Prager has it right when he says we Trump (general election) voters find lots of what he says (about NATO and Russia annexing the Crimea, for example.) very bad and disillusioning. But, I’m sure you can appreciate, being one of the smart people (sincerely), the absurdity of the situation we find ourselves in.
The Kevin Williamsons and Jonah Goldbergs and Michael Medveds and especially the Marco Rubios and Ted Cruzes never figured out how to defeat this guy. He’s all we have standing between Hillary Clinton determining the wages employers have to pay, and the relative “freedom” we enjoy now. It’s him or our 1A and 2A rights. It’s dark, I admit. But if you don’t laugh, you’ll end up crying. I just don’t find it useful to keep criticizing everything Trump says. What alternative do you #NeverTrumpers have in mind for those of us who find Clinton unthinkable?
It is hard to be practical in these circumstances. The best I have to offer is that criticism of Trump, and refusing to support him unless he earns it, could conceivably force him to moderate his positions and his rhetoric. If he thinks he’s losing he might do more along the lines of his Sp. Ct. list. Maybe identify some cabinet secretaries, or something to earn the votes of people who are currently skeptical. Maybe show that he is learning how to be president, how to be presidential.
If we all pledge our support to him just because he isn’t Hillary, then we get bad Trump, when there might be a half-decent Trump lurking in there somewhere.
John, excellent post. The absolute best part was the comment section illustrating the behavior you outlined so well.
Bravo.
Make the comfortable uncomfortable.
Well, it’s pretty simple. Drink the Kool-aid. Turn off your nerdy little brain. Support Trump no matter what he says. If what Trump says is too ridiculous, just announce that he didn’t really mean it. What he really meant was [insert whatever you wish he had said, in place of what he actually said].
You probably don’t actually need a lobotomy to accomplish this. Turning off your nerd brain can be achieved by sheer force of mob mentality. Watch the final scene of 1984 a few times. Watch how Winston throws himself into his support for Big Brother, shouting “Slavery is Freedom.” I mean, yeah, it took months of torture and brainwashing to get Winston to that point, but you can probably skip that part if you’re really committed.
The reward is that you become one of the mob. You will be an “ordinary person.” Part of the majority. Nothing is more important than being with the majority. Because then your candidate will “win.” The majority is always right. So abandon those nerdy ideas of thinking for yourself and holding principles. Long live Big Brother!
I’d find this approach more palatable if I didn’t believe the cementing of the Left’s agenda through the election of Clinton was catastrophic for the country. Instead, I see the relentless criticism of Trump from our side as doing what John says in this post. It’s reinforcing the idea in a lot of voter’s minds that more conventional Republicans are okay with the status quo and are largely unconcerned with the average guy’s concerns.
It is common sense to not want to import more terrorists (or to grow any here at home). How do we do that? Did Rubio or Cruz have practical proposals? Do they account for the fact that terrorists these days are predominantly Muslims, and not the IRA, Black Panthers, or Weather Underground? Sure “banning” Muslims sounds extreme, but what’s the conservative solution? I still haven’t heard it and the primaries are over.
No. Turn on your brain. You don’t understand what he is saying. My point is you need to start thinking not stop.
Exactly. The voters wanted answers and alternatives. What they got for the rest of the GOP was buzzwords and outrage over Trump’s disregard of the rules of their nerd subculture. Movement conservatives can’t seem to understand that. They honestly seem to think empty appeals to “principles” is enough. It is not.
I don’t think conservatives have made peace with the fact that homo economus doesn’t actually exist, that most people are extremely risk adverse, and have much shorter time horizons than the expected potential pay off of conservative policies as communicated. Nor do they talk to people. The conservative movement has devolved into a wannabe vanguard engaged in communal vulgar self-gratification, with a big “no fatties” sign on the door to the party.
Maybe it’s you who doesn’t understand what he is saying.
You claim that he is saying nothing more than, “I understand your problems and I care about them.”
He says “Ban all Muslims.” But that was last month. He’s off that now. Now it’s “ban immigration from countries tainted by terrorism.” Okay, what was wrong with the latter formulation, and why didn’t he come up with it 6 months ago? Did he need to come up with the offensive formulation to get people’s attention? Or is he not smart enough to see how his proposal would be received? Or was his first proposal a bargaining ploy? It was Trump, so it must have been a clever Machiavellian ploy.
How about his proposal to kill the families of terrorists, and when he was told that would be a war crime and the soldiers wouldn’t do it, he said, “Yes they will if I order them to.” I don’t just hear “I care about terrorism.” I hear, “I care about terrorism and there is no limit to the power I will assert when I am president. No one will be able to tell me what to do. If I say ‘Kill them,’ my orders will be followed.” What do you hear him saying?
(continued)
(continued)
When he says that his opponents “will have such problems when I’m elected,” (I think he was referring to Jeff Bezos) I hear him saying, “I will use the power of the presidency to go after my enemies, like Obama did, but even more so.” What do you hear him saying?
So, Trump supporters, go ahead and laugh some more at the fact that “I just don’t get it.” But I think that it is you who are willfully not getting it. You hear only what you want to hear, and disregard the rest.
Laugh is all you can do, because the issue has become so emotional for people like you, reason certainly isn’t going to work. Maybe he has modified his position. So what? Making a fetish out of consistency and never backing off a position is another thing political junkies do that normal people don’t. The point of the original proposal was to put something out to start a process for finding a solution. Rather than do that and debate solutions, the rest of the GOP just faking outrage of his breaking the rules. Now they are faking outrage over his coming closer to their position, whatever that is. All people like you seem to care about his a candidate’s ability to say the right buzz words and not brake the nerd rules. The rest of us don’t see it that way.
John,
Probably it is a violation of the CoC for me even to engage in this conversation. In my own defense, I am not the one who posted the claim that everyone who doesn’t support Trump is a stupid nerd, incapable of “higher levels of comprehension,” blind to the higher truth that the common folk understand so well. Probably I should have just rolled my eyes, and scrolled down to the next post. But I didn’t, so now I am going to say my piece.
You think I am stupid? You think I lack comprehension? You can’t even begin to comprehend what I think of you in return. I am fluent in white collar and blue collar. I can even speak and understand lefty. And I am quite fluent in stupid. Stupid is the easiest to understand. I not only understand everything that Trump says, I can actually see his thought process as he formulates one of his from-the-hip answers to a press question. I’ve had the opportunity to watch him do this over and over, since he has never thought out his position on anything in advance. He just says whatever sounds good to him at that moment. I understand it perfectly, and I understand why it sounds good to people who don’t want to bother to think about what it means.
If you care only about the faux “wisdom” of the masses, you had best get used to their choice – Hillary.
Well, this finally convinced me. I don’t agree with you, so reason isn’t going to work.
You claim that I refuse to hear what Trump is saying (as you interpret it). There is only one way to interpret it, and that is your way. All other people are emotional, unreasoning nerds
Do you even hear yourself?
Let’s dive into Islamic terrorism a little deeper to illustrate the problem. I’m of the opinion that the development of ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis were less likely had the US maintained a strong military presence in Iraq (and Afghanistan, but that’s another topic) over a long period of time. Instead, Obama sold the idea of “ending” (not “winning”) the war and withdrawing our influence. He convinced us to take the wide road.
I remember conventional Republicans talking about this in the primaries, but in smarty-pants terms like “Status of Forces Agreement.” Honest to Pete, the average guy going to work every day and struggling with the vagaries of life isn’t going to be convinced to make a long term commitment in the Middle East because some Republican knows Obama’s (intentional) failure to renegotiate the SFA was a disaster for our long term interests. Make the dang case! In language people understand!!
They left the door wide open for DT to step through with “ban Muslims.”
Then Hugh Hewitt (who I believe is a yuuge talent — another very smart guy) goes mental because DT doesn’t know what the “nuclear triad” is. Face-palm. First off, it’s intended to address Cold War threats, not the kind of threats we’re seeing today. And, second, Joe Blow doesn’t know what the hell it is either! Or care!!!
Let’s face it. Our intellectual elites couldn’t persuade their way outof a wetpaperbag.
I don’t think they want to think about the implications of the 2nd generation Muslim problem in Europe either. The price of their moral vanity is getting run over by a truck or hacked up with a hatchet. When god’s great waiter fate comes to deliver that check, you can rest assured they are going to slide that bill right across the table to some guy on his way to work. This guy on his way to work is probably inclined to live and let live, but he also probably doesn’t want to get attacked by hatchet wielding madmen.
I never said everyone who supported Trump is a stupid nerd. I said the political and media class are nerds who didn’t understand what he is saying. You can understand what he means and still disagree. The problem is not that people cannot reasonably disagree with Trump, they can. The problem is that his critics in the media and politics seem incapable of doing it.
Vanity of inanity.
I can’t figure out if this is sarcasm, if it’s a joke that I am too dumb to get, (because I’m not part of the right group, and I don’t have the secret handshake), or if you’ve completely missed the point of my comment.
Right now, I’m leaning towards “completely missed the point.”
Yeah, pretty much.
Though, admittedly, Ricochet isn’t the best place to go if you want to find people terribly insulted by the label “nerd”, however much emotional satisfaction someone willing to believe that nerds can’t be “real people” might get from self-identifying as a non-nerd.
Why should Kluge’s post have taught those not supporting Trump something new about the foolishness of the political class?
Larry, you’ve known several fellow Ricochet members who aren’t supporting Trump for years. It’s not like it’s some big secret that several of these members joined Ricochet in order to derive amusement from the foolishness of the political class. There is no contradiction between believing the political class to be rather foolish and believing that Trump isn’t the cure.